Bad Press And It's Not Even Twelve Tone

Some 15 years ago, a major music publication (it may have been the august Schwann catalog, only I'm not fully sure) conducted a survey of its readers to determine the composer they liked least. The hands-down winner was Arnold Schoenberg. At that moment, and during a great many subsequent moments, I've wondered why Schoenberg  seemed to inspire such universal disdain-and largely still does.

My conclusion is that Schoenberg was the victim of bad press, and senseless partisan politics among musicians and critics-alike. To wit, he was an odd, misfit composer who, by  means of a hare-brained theory, undermined the very foundations of Western music. He created unpalatable music which could only be appreciated by severely skewed musical academicians, not the general musical public. Worse yet, he created senseless noise, and those who claimed to like it were, like him. charlatans, suffering from some sort of emperor's new- clothes syndrome.

When Igor Stravinsky, a tonal, accessible composer if ever there was one (and an admirer of Schoenberg), decided in his old age to try his hand at "12-tone" composition, his one-time colleague and champion, Ernest Ansermet, hastily produced a book purporting to prove, in incontrovertible mathematical terms (Ansermet was a mathematician before becoming a preeminent conductor), that 12-tone music was not music. In point of fact, Stravinsky and Ansermet had had a falling out, and Ansermet was venting his spleen at his onetime close friend. The problem is that these various reputations precede Schoenberg, and often prejudice neophyte listeners.

All of this is really moot, because the string quartet in question is not 12-tone music. It belongs to the neo-romantic period in Schoenberg's career during which he produced the beautiful Verklarte Nacht, the romantic Gurrelieder, and the luscious Pelleas und Melisande.

Schoenberg was a very paradoxical composer. He was conservative, with an abiding love and respect for the great classical composers (Brahms was one of his heroes), yet he created a method of composition that radically undermined classical procedure. He was a very intellectual composer, yet he wrote some of the most emotionally wrenching music in the entire literature. Like Beethoven before him, he understood that intellectual rigor, complex counterpoint, and structural soundness were the means for creating the most highly communicative music. Unfortunately for Schoenberg, his music is so rigorous, and so expressive, that for many of us it fails to communicate (another  paradox).

Like most of the finer things in life, his music is an acquired taste, and if one wishes to put forth the effort, the rewards are great. 

Composed in 1905, this quartet used the first movement of Beethoven's ''Eroica" Symphony as its "conscious model" (the words are Schoenberg's)-a splendid example of a virtually monothematic movement which appears, on the surface, to contain a huge amount of thematic variety. Schoenberg derives the whole of his 45-minute quartet from its opening phrase, a procedure which puts him in line with most practitioners of Western music from the early classical symphonists through Bruckner and Sibelius. What makes this quartet truly noteworthy is the enormous emotional range of its abundant thematic transformations.

This is super-romantic, super-heated, intensely heady stuff. "Expressionism", the term used to describe this phase of Schoenberg's career, really doesn't do it justice. As with most seminal 20th-century works, this piece bad a stormy premiere. Mahler was in the audience, and when the great composer scolded a man for hissing during the performance, the man loudly replied: "I hiss at your symphonies too!"

One point that is usually neglected by annotators in discussing this work is its wonderful exploration of string sonorities. Schoenberg was a master string composer. and his sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge) effects, and his use of harmonics, are downright ravishing.

The Mendelssohn Quartet plays this difficult work with passionate fervor, spot-on intonation, and a secure sense of its emotional breadth and power. I can think of no better initiation into its manifold wonders.